Chip designer ARM on Monday plans to announce its first set of processors based on its DynamIQ microprocessor architecture, in conjunction with a revised GPU chip.
DynamIQ, explained ARM product marketing head John Ronco in a phone interview with The Register, represents "a new way of combining CPUs together and giving more …

Star Wars New Hope @ 40
In the 40 years since the release of the original Star Wars, special effects have changed beyond recognition.
Computers – critical to today's generation of Star Wars successors – were relatively rare during the mid 1970s. Expensive and huge, they were the preserve of governments, universities and big corporations. Personal …

A 42,000-transistor CPU weighing half a ton and built by hand from full-sized components has been installed at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England.
James Newman’s Megaprocessor, a super-sized CPU big enough to walk through, was born as a result of a 2012 work discussion.
"There was a conversation at work …

When it comes to PC performance the elephant in the room is heat generation.
Generally, the cooler a CPU or GPU can be kept the faster it will run, hence mega-overclocked systems running liquid nitrogen cooling systems and producing mind-numbingly high benchmark scores and more clouds than your average Pink Floyd concert.
For …

Lower power, higher capacity, less PCB real estate: that's the list of wins being touted by AMD for its coming High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) architecture.
The previously-sketchy details of HBM have been filled out in this AMD white paper.
The architecture is slated to roll in some of the Radeon 300 series cards when they land, …

The MIPS processor architecture behind many graphics cards and the PlayStation 2 is being laid bare by its licensee Imagination Technologies.
While ARM and Intel dominate the chip market, the MIPS third option is still a significant player in the industry – but what goes on inside processors is a closely guarded secret. …

Atmel reckons it has crafted the world's lowest-power ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers, a family of chips that can go for "decades" on the same batteries. The SAM-L21 family is aimed at "fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and devices placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas."
Atmel says samples of …

An effort to tightly knit together graphics chips, processors and other hardware to boost things like video search on your desktop has taken a step forward.
The HSA Foundation today officially published version 1.0 of its Heterogeneous System Architecture specification, which (if we were being flippant) describes how GPUs, …

Oracle has revealed details of its next-generation SPARC CPU, the M7.
As John Fowler, Oracle's executive veep of systems predicted when chatting to The Reg last month, the company took the wraps off the M7 at last week's Hot Chips CPU-fest and filled it with goodies to make Oracle software go faster.
Under the hood of the CPU …

NVIDIA has taken the wraps off “Denver”, its long-rumoured 64-bit ARMv8 architecture compatible, system-on-a-chip (SoC), and claims it delivers performance equivalent to some CPUs found in PCs.
The company has blogged about the silicon, the successor to its current 32-bit Tegra K1 models.
Denver will come in two versions, …

Review
It seems as if we waited an age for the latest unlocked "K" versions of the upgraded 22nm Haswell CPUs, but at long last they are here in the form of the Devil’s Canyon processors.
Intel Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K CPU
Intel's Devil's Canyon has some fancy artwork to go with it, but the chip looks like a chip
Currently, …

Deep Tech
AMD has announced an ambitious 2020 goal of a 25-times improvement of the power efficiency of its APUs, the company's term for accelerated processing units – on-die mashups of CPU, GPU, video-accelerator, or any other types of cores.
Although AMD has committed itself to that goal, it won't be an easy one to achieve. Efficiency …

Qualcomm has announced two new 64-bit processors in its Snapdragon line, both aimed at high-end smartphones and tablets, and both "designed to deliver the ultimate connected mobile computing experiences in video, imaging and graphics," the company modestly says.
The Snapdragon 810 and 808 are both based on ARM Cortex-A57 and …

AMD has released its long-awaited Kaveri processor, the first accelerated processing unit (APU) to incorporate both on-die CPU and GPU cores in a heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) with a shared memory architecture.
AMD Kaveri - overview
Behold Kaveri, in which CPUs and GPUs are equal 'compute unit' partners (click to …

SC13
From Intel's point of view, today's hottest trend in high-performance computing – GPU acceleration – is just a phase, one that will be superseded by the advent of many-core CPUs, beginning with Chipzilla's next-generation Xeon Phi, codenamed "Knights Landing".
"Tomorrow looks quite fundamentally different," Rajeeb Hazra, VP of …

Memory specialist Micron has announced a new accelerator processor that it claims outperforms Intel's chips when it comes to dealing with streaming data.
The "Automata Processor" was announced by the company on Monday and billed as a device that uses the inherent parallelism of memory architectures to speed the ingestion and …

APU13
The desktop version of AMD's next-generation accelerated processing unit, an APU code named "Kaveri", will hit the streets on January 14, the company announced at its developers conference, APU13, in San José, California, on Monday evening.
AMD's upcoming 'Kaveri' processor - overview
Kaveri: AMD's next big thing …

AMD is to manufacture microprocessors that connect their on-board CPU and GPU components more intelligently than ever before.
The upcoming chips will utilise a technique AMD calls Heterogeneous Queuing (hQ). This new approach puts the GPU on an equal footing with the CPU: no longer will the graphics engine have to wait for the …